That didn't take long.
Well, okay, so the game was scoreless for the first 4:27, and Northwestern led only 1-0 after 22 minutes and change.
But after that, the deluge. The Wildcats scored nine more times before Penn got on the board, including an 8-0 halftime advantage, and that was basically that. The final score was 12-2, and Northwestern will play for its third straight national championship on Sunday.
So much for the buzz in the crowd, at least the part that wasn't rooting for Northwestern. And I have to say, there were far more people in the crowd of 6,428 rooting for Penn than I expected. It's certainly the first time in a long time I've seen a pep band at a non-basketball Final Four.
As I watched the demolition, I thought of the 1979 men's basketball Final Four, the last time a Penn team faced a Big Ten team at this stage of an NCAA Tournament. That Quakers team was really a Cinderella, even if it had a lot of respect nationally -- a 9-seed that ousted overwhelming favorites St. John's and North Carolina to make it to the big stage. In this tournament, Penn was the 4-seed, and beat the 13 and the 5-seeds to get here.
Still, the basketball game was 50-17 at halftime and 101-67 at the end. The opponent, Michigan State was led by some guy named Magic Johnson. You might have heard of him. Northwestern had Aly Josephs, who scored five goals, and Kristen Kjellman, whose hat trick gave her the all-time record for goals in the NCAA Tournament.
Now, as you might notice from looking at my headshot, I wasn't around that year. So, to find a better perspective, I turned to a guy who was in Salt Lake City that day, longtime Penn statistician Stu Suss.
He called the comparison "a little unfair to the basketball team."
"As ugly as it was in the first half, [the 1979 team] actually played well," Suss said. "They got all sorts of open shots, missed a bunch of layups. It wasn't as clear until around 10 minutes in that it was going to be a domination."
Interesting, then, that Northwestern only out-shot Penn 21-20, and that the teams were tied at 15 ground balls and eight draw controlls (faceoffs) apiece. But that's the difference between the top team in the country and the rest of the field.
Yet given Northwestern's fast rise to prominence in college lacrosse, Suss said Penn is capable of something similar.
"It's a tremendous accomplishment for a program that doesn't have a history and tradition to crack the Final Four," he said. "It doesn't appear to be a George Mason kind of thing where you say this is a one-shot deal and their moment in the sun has come and gone. You have some reason to believe this coaching staff has put together the foundation for a nationally competitive team for a while."
Despite that, there was a definite air of finality in the press conference room after the game. No matter what they told themselves before the game, you could tell that Penn's three leading seniors -- attack Chrissy Muller and defenders Karen Jann and Sarah Eastburn -- sensed the full force of the fact that their college careers were over.
"It is bittersweet," a quite emotional Muller said. "Walking in here, Karen said, 'Don't think about this game, think about everything we've done. "I'm just really sad to leave, and that it had to end this way."
"This was a fantastic experience for all of us, but especially us seniors," Eastburn said. "We came into this program our freshman year with [coach] Karin [Brower] instilling in us this belief that we could be here [and] we could win a national championship, and I think the four seniors truly believed that."
